Is Anything Impossible?

Anyone who had known the small Essex port of Harwich on England's east coast might remember it as a haven for coasters, and occasional ferries to and from the Continent. Now, after three years of war, it was equally hard to imagine it as anything but the bustling, overcrowded and vital naval base which necessity had made it, where two rivers, Stour and Orwell, embraced, and where swift currents and unhelpful tides could make pilotage and coming alongside a nightmare for the inexperienced or the overconfident.

This bitter December afternoon was much like any other, hard and bright, but without the usual raw wind from the North Sea.

Here there were vessels of every kind, hard-worked escorts, hulls dented and scraped from East Coast convoys, when columns of obedient merchantmen sometimes grid-ironed through another convoy passing on the opposite course, every Skipper very aware of the narrowness of the swept channel, and the lurking minefields often on either beam. Under normal conditions it was bad enough, with ships depending on good lookouts and skilled seamanship; in poor weather and under cover of darkness it required nerves of steel. There were minesweepers, many of them fishing craft before the war; some were paddle steamers, which had once carried children and carefree holidaymakers on day trips. Under a coat of grey paint, and armed only with Lewis guns, they had become men-of-war overnight.

And destroyers, perhaps the most versatile of them all. The new, smaller ships of the Hunt Class had been designed as fast escorts, and denied the formidable array of torpedoes which had become part of a destroyer's legend, her life-blood. They looked neat and at odds with the thin-funnelled veterans of the Kaiser's war, the old V&W Class destroyers, outdated in appearance, but without which the war at sea would already have been lost.

Three long years of it. Mounting losses of ships and men and military defeats: Dunkirk and Norway, Greece and Crete, Singapore and Hong Kong, and only the English Channel between us and them. And yet here, forged out of their own kind of war, seamen could still turn and stare at a newcomer, or at something unusual. The navy, they said, was like a family; it took care of its own. When yet another ship was reported lost or missing on the news bulletins few sailors would comment. They had built a shell around themselves, if only to withstand the glib explanations by "experts" on the wireless or in the press who spoke of strategic withdrawals or tactical deployments, rather than use the cold, correct term: retreat.

But it was there, all the same. When one of their ships had returned from patrol to this same harbour, her plating scarred and pitted after an engagement with a German E-boat or destroyer, and a line of covered corpses laid on her quarterdeck, there had been only a silence which spoke more than words. The family.

On this day, though, it was something different.

The destroyer had entered harbour just before sunset the previous evening, and had moored fore-and-aft to allocated buoys. The light had been almost gone by the time the cable had been secured.

In her new dazzle paint she seemed to shine against the backdrop of the Harwich Force. The older hands were familiar with these now famous Tribal Class destroyers; the youngsters often dreamed of the chance of joining one. Or commanding one.

Perhaps the Tribals represented better than most the change from peace to war. A rare example of foresight, they had been laid down and launched as the clouds had gathered over Europe, and were in action within weeks of Chamberlain's grim and inevitable announcement.

Ordinary people had been brought up to accept the Royal Navy as an invincible power, the sure shield; it had become over the years something both familiar and proud. Setbacks, defeats and evacuations had changed all that. Names so well known even to those who never saw the sea were gone like chalk sponged from a blackboard. Royal Oak, Prince of Wales, Repulse, Barham, Ark Royal. Gone.

It seemed now that wherever the war at sea was at its toughest the Tribals would be a part of it. Like this one, HMS Hakka, her pendant number, G-44, freshly painted on her side before she had quit the Tyne, where she had been laid down and had first tasted salt water.

She seemed to tower over the other destroyers around her. In fact she was some fifty feet longer than most of them, and broader in the beam, with a superbly flared forecastle and a raked bow to add to the immediate impression of strength and speed.

Only a more experienced eye would pick out the scars and gashes beneath the dazzle paint. It had happened in the Mediterranean, when Hakka had been supporting the Eighth Army as it fell back under the unstoppable weight of Rommel's Afrika Korps. But she had survived, and after some makeshift repairs at Gibraltar she had returned with a convoy to England, back to her birthplace on the Tyne.

A small motor boat surged in a tight arc, the bowman ready to hook on to the accommodation ladder, above which the duty quartermaster and sentry stood watching with interest. The "bowman" was in fact a girl, a Wren, who executed the task with obvious indifference to her audience. The coxswain, another Wren, waved a gloved hand, and loosened the chin-stay keeping her cap from being blown away.

She was used to the stares, the suggestive glances. You had to be, or you went under.

She called, "One to be signed for! I'll come aboard!"

The boats with their Wren crews were as much a part of the harbour as the sea itself. Carrying mail, passengers, bags of coal, light stores nobody else wanted to deliver, they were everywhere.

The coxswain, her face pink from the bitter air, strode across the quarterdeck, pausing only to toss a salute before she unbuttoned her dripping oilskin and reached inside for the envelope.

She had seen him by the after lobby, above which a pair of four-point-seven guns had been trained abeam, probably for cleaning. There were two officers, and a civilian in a boiler suit who was jabbing at a large notebook. But she knew the one she wanted; she always did. That was something else she had found impossible to explain to her mother and father when she was on leave.

She saluted again. "Lieutenant-Commander Fairfax, sir?"

Both officers were wearing raincoats, without any markings of rank. But she knew, although she did not see the surprise in his eyes. The uncertainty.

"That's me."

She opened the envelope and took out a smaller one, then offered her little pad and studied him as he signed it.

Young, late twenties; his eyes were grey, what she had seen of them. Boyish even, except for the lines of strain around his mouth, a tenseness which she had come to recognise, especially in destroyers.

Lieutenant-Commander James Fairfax watched her hurry back to the ladder, and wondered briefly what she looked like without the bulging coat and seaboots.

She had called him by rank, and he had almost failed to respond to it. The new half-stripe had been advanced for him, and he was not used to it.

He glanced up at the forward funnel where some painters were examining their workmanship. A new stripe there too, for Hakka. He felt the bitterness welling up again, like a pain, a deep hurt. He was being stupid. He had heard himself reason it out, over and...